Christ and His Church in the Book of Psalms

Few of the Books of Scripture are richer than the Book of Psalms, that “Hymn-hook for all times,” as it has been called. “There,” says Luther, you look right down into the heart of saints, and behold all manner of joys and joyous thoughts toward God and his love springing lustily into life! Again, you look into the heart of saints as into death and hell! How gloomy and dark their mournful visions of God.” Another has said, “The Psalms teach me to prize a much tried life.” And Tholuck (who gives these quotations) remarks, “Songs which, like the Psalms, have stood the test of three thousand years, contain a germ for eternity.”

The Psalms are for all ages alike — not more for David than for us. Even as the cry, ‘’ If is finished.’” though first heard by the ear of John and the women from Galilee, who stood at the cross, was not meant for them more truly than for us; so with the Psalms

The writers were prepared by God, through personal and public circumstances, for breathing forth appropriately the mind of Him who used them. Irving, in his preface to Hortie on the Psalms has spoken some most valuable truths on this subject. He remarks that the Psalms, like the prophetic writings, “arose by the suggestion of some condition of the Church, present in the days of the prophets, as the particular case. But passing beyond this in time, and passing beyond it in aggravation of every circumstance, they give as it were a consecutive glance of all the like cases and kindred passages in the history of the Church, and bring out the general law of God’s providence and grace in the present, and in all the future parallel cases.” The Psalmist, however, was not to be an automaton, nor his readers mere lookers on or listeners to what the automaton gives forth. ‘^ Therefore, God moulded his man to his purpose, and cast him into the conditions that suited his ends. And still he was a man, acted on by course of nature, and manifest to the people as a fellow-man, through whom, indeed, they heard soul-stirring truths, uttered with ear-piercing words, but suited to their case, and thrust in their way, and spoken to their feelings, and pressed on their consciences, and riveted there by the most mighty sanctions of life and death, present and eternal.”” And asTHE Word which was in the beginnmg took not voice, nor intelligence, but flesh, human flesh, and the fulness of the Godhead was manifested bodily; so when that same Word came to the fathers by the pro-PREFACE. Vll

phets, and discovered a part of his fulness, it was through their flesh, or their humanity — that is, through their present condition of spirit, and mind, and body, and outward estate.”

It was for this end that God led David the round of all human conditions, that he might catch the spirit proper to every one, and utter it according to the truth. ‘’ He allowed him not to curtail his being by treading the round of one function; but by a variety of functions he cultivated his whole being, and filled his soul with wisdom and feeling. He found him objects of every affection. He brought him up in the sheep-pastures, that the groundwork of his character might be laid through simple and universal forms of feeling. He took him to the camp, that he might be filled with nobleness of soul, and ideas of glory. He placed him in the palace, that he might be filled with ideas of majesty and sovereign might. He carried him to the wilderness and placed him in solitudes, thiit his soul might dwell alone in the sublime conception of God and his mighty works. And he kept him there for long years, with only one step between him and death, that he might be well schooled to trust and depend upon the providence of God. And in none of these various conditions and vocations of life did He take from him His Holy Spirit. His trials were hut the tuning of the instrument with loMcli the Spirit might express the various melodies which He designed to utter htj him for the consolation and edification. ofupirituAd men.

Vlll PREFACE.

John the Baj)tist, having to be used for rough work,

was trained in the desert Every one hath

been disciplined by the providence of God, as well as furnished in the fountains of his being, for that particular work for which the Spirit of God designed him.”

The literal and historical sense is in the highest degree profitable; as Calvin, and Venema, and Matthew Henry, and others, have shewn. But our principle is, that having once found the literal sense, the exact meaning of the terms, and the primary application of the Psalm, we are then to ask what the Holy Spirit intended to teach in all ages by this formula. Bishop Home speaks of such study as being like a traveller’s ascent to an eminence, “neither unfruitful nor unpleasant,” whence he gets an extensive prospect lying beyond, and stretching away to the far distance. Bishop Horsley quotes 2 Sam. xxiii. 3, ‘’ The /Spirit of Jehovah sppake by me, and His word was in my tongue” — and adds, “If Dadd be allowed to have had any knowledge of the true subject of his own compositions, that subject was nothing in his own life, but something put into his mind by the Holy Spirit of God.” This is so far true; but at the same time let us hold (as stated above) that what the Spirit put into David’s mind, or the mind of any other writer, was done not abruptly, but in connection with the writer’s position. Even as our Lord’s sayings for all ages were not uttered at random in any circumstances, but were always connected naturally with some present passing event or incident.

‘’Jesus answered and said,” is true of them all: he Strang his pearls on the thread of passing occurrences or conversations. And even so is it with the Psalms. They take their rise in things local and temporary, but they pass onward from the present into the ages to come.

Now, in the early ages, men full of the thoughts of Christ could never read the Psalms without being reminded of their Lord. They probably had no system or fixed theory as to all the Psalms referring to Christ; but still, unthinkingly we might say, they found their thoughts wandering to their Lord, as the one Person in whom these breathings, these praises, these desires, these hopes, these deep feelings, found their only true and full realization. Hence Augustine (Psa. lviii.) said to his hearers, as he expounded to them this book, that “the voice of Christ and his Church was well-nigh the only voice to be heard in the Psalms” — “Vix est ut in Psahnis inveniamus vocem yiisi Christi et JEcdesiae;” and on another occasion (Psa. xliii.), “Everywhere diffused throughout is that man whose Head is above, and whose members are below. We ought to recognise his voice in all the Psalms, either waking up the psaltery or uttering the deep groan — rejoicing in hope, or heaving sighs over present realities.” Tertullian (quoted by Home) says, ‘^ Omnes pocne Psalnd Christi personam sustinent.”

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